A successful media strategy once looked like reaching as many people with your message as possible. Scale was everything, meaning brands prioritised channels where they could reach as many of their consumers at one time.

That meant investment in TV, radio, print and out of home channels to try and drive as much impact as possible. It’s no secret that many of these channels get fewer eyes and ears than they once did. Much advertising spend has shifted to digital channels, whether that’s social media, streaming channels or search.

IPA Touchpoints 2025 data found that British audiences now spend more time on their mobile than in front of the TV, for example.

This shift isn’t new, with increased digital spend having been a factor for at least the last decade. However, what does seem to be changing is the means by which brands aim to engage with consumers.

To use the framing of Catherine Kehoe, Nationwide’s top marketer, speaking at the IPA Effectiveness Awards last year as chair of judges, many marketers perceive that “brands are increasingly being built on the ground”.

“Hand-to-hand marketing is replacing fire and forget,” she said.

Rather than putting out a big, mass-reach ad, many brands are opting to shift more of their budget towards efforts designed to individually engage audiences. That could be through using influencers, brand “experiences” (either in real life or online), or organic social media.

In a new series, Marketing Week will be exploring effectiveness amid changing modes of engagements. The series will ask what is underpinning marketers’ decisions to shift spend away from a traditional advertising models, how brands are using new channels and what effectiveness looks like there, and explore wider implications for how brands are built.

To kick off the series, this piece gathers different quotes from senior marketers at some of the world’s biggest brands, expressing how their approach to communicating their brands is changing. Not all these views exactly converge, some are arguing for revolution and some evolution. The purpose of bringing these points of view together is to illustrate a shift pattern among how brands are talking about their communications strategy.

In quotes

Unilever: Deploying influencers to counteract ‘suspicious’ brands

Perhaps the most prominent example of a major marketing organisation having publicly declared a pivot in how it will communicate its brands is Unilever. When its CEO Fernando Fernandez took over in March 2025, he declared a focus on influencer marketing.

The CEO of the FMCG giant, which owns brands including Dove, Marmite and Cif, declared that: “Brands are by default suspicious”.

“Messages from brands coming from corporations are suspicious messages,” he said.

Fernandez’s answer to this: influencers.

“Creating marketing activity systems in which others can speak for your brand at scale is very important,” he said.

He pledged to hire 20 times more influencers in a bid to build trust in its brands through what he termed “others speak” at scale.

One example of how the business is rolling this out is in Unilever’s home care sector, where it is deploying ‘Cleanipedia’, an influencer initiative that sees the company’s brands tap into cleaning trends on social media. Marketing Week recently interviewed the company on the topic.

Read about Unilever’s shift to influencers here

Kraft Heinz: Consumers may no longer be ‘receiving’ the message from traditional advertising

This year’s Cannes Lions saw Kraft Heinz North American CMO Todd Kaplan challenge marketers to hold themselves “to a higher standard” on how they judge the effectiveness of their advertising.

Advertising may be being viewed but it’s not being absorbed, he argued.

“It’s almost like the paid media is taking the creative idea, you’re folding it in a little paper airplane and just sending it right into your consumers’ social feed, into their television room in their living room, wherever they are,” Kaplan said.

This approach of sending off creative work to consumers and expecting it to be delivered like it’s mail is just not relevant to the modern consumer, who is consuming so much media via their phones and other devices every day, he stated. Dropping work into these consumers’ laps and expecting it to be remembered, and impactful, is just not realistic.

“Just because your message was delivered does not mean it was received,” Kaplan argued.

He said Kraft Heinz is tapping into “passion points” such as sport and music to resonate with consumers and engage with them in a way that is memorable and relevant. For Kaplan, that means utilising organic social media as well as partnerships with celebrities and sports people to tap into the zeitgeist.

He urged marketers to create brand communication which “lives beyond the walls of paid media where real life actually happens”.

Read what Todd Kaplan had to say here

Cadbury: Brand communication has become a ‘two-way dialogue’

Cadbury is a brand known for its iconic TV advertising, such as its ‘There’s a Glass and a Half in Everyone’ platform.

Yet, the brand is also adjusting to changing consumer expectations about how brands communicate, senior marketing director Elise Burditt told Marketing Week earlier this year.

Burditt noted that consumers today expect to have “a two-way dialogue” with a brand, rather than being spoken at. These expectations require brands such as Cadbury to invest more in experiences and driving engagement.

The experiences cited by Burditt included Cadbury’s partnership with different football teams, such as Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, offering chances for fans to win tickets to games through its Cadbury FC initiative.

Its Secret Santa campaign, which has been running since 2018, allows consumers to scan QR codes to send chocolate to friends or family over the festive period.

Another example of a digital experience created by the brand was its generative AI-powered tool ‘My Cadbury Era’, launched as part of its 200th birthday celebrations, which allowed consumers to put themselves in classic Cadbury posters.

Read the interview with Cadbury here

Mastercard: Experiences over a ‘bombarding’ of consumers

Outgoing Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar expressed surprise that marketers still remain so heavily invested in traditional advertising.

“I’m very shocked because I know for a fact that advertising is not working the way it used to in the past,” he told Marketing Week in June, adding that the average consumer is being “bombarded” by anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 ads every single day, something that the human brain “cannot process” and so it tunes out.

He said he would have expected marketers to have already “reinvented” how they approach advertising.

At Mastercard, this is a process well under way, he asserted. The brand has diverted budget away from traditional advertising and towards experiential marketing, or what he terms “immersive experiences that money cannot buy”, exclusive to Mastercard.

He cites strong effectiveness from these initiatives, crediting them with helping Mastercard become the 12th most valuable brand in the world, according to Kantar’s BrandZ ranking.

Read the interview with Mastercard here

McDonald’s: Having more ‘one-to-one conversations’ with consumers

McDonald’s is another brand that excels at big TV advertising. It is not moving away from this, but is also looking to build a new “muscle” in how it engages with consumers, UK CMO Ben Fox told Marketing Week.

“My job as a new CMO is to find ways to connect with people on different channels in different ways that doesn’t always require a brilliant TV ad. That’s probably the muscle that we need to continue to develop,” he said, having taken on the helm of marketing at the brand in the UK earlier this year.

Whether it’s on social media or through its own app, the brand is working “to earn the right to have those conversations with the customers that are at a slightly more one-to-one level,” Fox said.

Read the interview with McDonald’s here

Coca-Cola: An ‘experiences universe’

Coca-Cola is re-evaluating how it drives effectiveness across its brands, it said, with senior director Nisa Genc speaking at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing last month.

“We’re now talking about an experiences universe rather than one-way mass exposure,” Genc said.

While mass reach is still absolutely vital for Coca-Cola as one of the biggest consumer goods businesses in the world, it is no longer aiming to do this simply with one big advert. Instead, scaled personalisation and experiences is what is going to truly engage consumers, Genc said.

The business now views driving behaviour change as the most important measure of effectiveness, something that must be done by engagement with consumers rather than projecting messages at them.

Initiatives like ‘Share a Coke’ which allow consumers to engage through tools like AI and digitally, as well as physically in store, are examples of how Coca-Cola is bringing its “experiences universe” to life.

Read Coca-Cola at Festival of Marketing here

In numbers

Very few brands will provide details of how they are changing advertising spend. They may talk about making shifts towards investing more spend into social channels, but not give specific splits.

Below are some available statistics. It should be noted that this data is often not directly comparable. The numbers below cover different time frames. Some of the data provided by businesses details “social” spend while others cover “digital”, the latter is often used as a term to include the former.

Digital covers more than just social spend, with digital display, streaming and online retail media all being include in the figure. Social may also refer to social display advertising rather than influencer spend.

The figures below are meant to illustrate a shift in trend and may not refer to the more individualised, “engagement” driving marketing that is referenced in many of the quotes above.

Unilever

The Dove owner announced it will upweight its social media spend from around 30% to circa 50% of its advertising budget. (Source.)

Nestlé

In 2024, over 70% of its advertising spend went into digital channels from 47% in 2020. (Sources: 2020 and 2024.)

Mars Food and Nutrition

In 2019, the business was probably spending around 50% of communications investment on digital channels, now it’s circa 74%. (Source.)

The Coca-Cola Company

In 2019, digital spend was less than 30% of total media spend, in 2024 it was circa 65%. (Source).

Mastercard

Pivoted an estimated 70% of its spend ‘away from traditional methods’. (Source.)

Total UK ad spend

Social media as a percentage of total UK ad spend has gone from circa 4% in 2014 to around 21% in 2024 (Source: AA/WARC Expenditure report). (Note: AA/WARC expenditure figures cover ad spend as collected from media owners, and so most influencer spend, which does not ordinarily go through the platforms is not captured).

WPP Media

In 2025, for the first time, more than half of content-driven advertising revenue will come from user-generated platforms rather than professionally produced content.

Is marketing effectiveness changing?

While the quotes and figures above do not represent a uniform view or undeviating tactics adopted across marketers, they do present a shift in at least how many brands are talking about their approach to their marketing mix.

The common themes are that many big brands (including the likes of Unilever and Coca-Cola) are questioning whether mass media alone can drive the impact it once did. It’s not just about the channels themselves, but instead the ways in which brands seek to engage with consumers, the idea is that, whether it’s through experiences, influencers or organic social, brands need to drive a more resonant communication with their audience, as opposed to just broadcasting at them.

This begs many questions. What data and insight is informing a shift in media mix from some of the biggest advertisers? How can big brands, used to driving scale and consistency, be effective in more one to one communication? How is strategy driven forward with more fragmented channels that are less in the control of brands, such as influencers? If scale is less impactful than it was before, how do big brands harness their equity in their advertising?

Starting with what marketers have told us and what we’ve seen already, Marketing Week will be looking into some of these questions through an upcoming series of features.